Beginning March 26, 2010, Blogger will no longer support FTP publishing. This means that if you are one of the .5% of Blogger users utilizing an FTP service to publish a blog to your own domain, things are a-changin’.

Citing a drain on their “engineering resources,” the Google-owned platform has made the decision in order to concentrate on new features and improvements in 2010.

According to Blogger Buzz, the official Blogger blog (say that fast three times!), FTP users will not be left flailing in the dark. A migration tool that allows users to shift to a Blogger-managed URL (can be a custom domain or Blogspot URL) will be made available on February 22.

While some users might not be happy about the change, Blogger has been soliciting opinions and advice from their base for quite some time via Twitter.

Are you a Blogger FTP user? If so, please voice your opinion in the comments section below.

Whilst my own blog is running an FTP based blogger website, I was planning on switching to WordPress anyway.

The biggest problems for people that this will cause come from sites that have Blogger setup as /blog/ on a sub directory of their website. In a couple of months, these blogs will no longer be able to publish to this, and will instead have to look at either switching to a sub-domain and implementing appropriate redirects, or look at another platform.

As someone who has set this up for a number of friends and clients, this is going to be problematic, especially if you consider the hundreds of posts involved and potentially having to move these to another platform.

I know of hundreds of sites that use Blogger for this method, and they are all just going to be left in the wilderness as a result of this!

Oppenheimer & Co analyst Timothy Horan said he suspected building out the trial broadband network would cost Google about $1,000 to $2,000 per subscriber if it bought unused fiber lines already underneath many cities.

i have been dragging my feet about moving my blog to WordPress. this forces my hand. but it’s a huge pain. i’ve been unhappy with blogger for a while now. i feel like they haven’t done anything useful with the service in a long time, and a the few useful improvements have been only for blogspot hosted accounts. i’m very, very unhappy with blogger and google for doing this.

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